RESOURCES • LIFE’S RESOURCES & THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

Why Capitalism is Death-bound and How People Can Opt for Life: A Theological Proposal to Economists

By ULRICH DUCHROW

 

Capitalism-Christianity Conference

Union Theological Seminary

2011 MARCH 25 | NEW YORK, USA

People in western societies, when they hear the question “why capitalism is death-bound?”, expect the answer: “socialism is not”. And they understand by socialism what is called “historic socialism” or “real socialism”. Consequently they stop listening, because evidently this attempt of an alternative to capitalism failed. The normal conclusion is: capitalism is without alternative. Could it be that both, capitalism and historic socialism have common roots, are part of one historic development: western modernity. So if reality shows that both, capitalism and historic socialism, have failed, we have to dig deeper and analyze the roots and structures of modern civilization and look for alternatives transcending it. This does not exclude looking at emancipatory elements in modernity, including concepts of socialism.

There is another prejudice preventing us from looking for deeper transformation of modernity: the so-called “social market economy” (SME). Many Europeans, including the majority of European churches[1], boast that their system—in difference from the Anglo-Saxon neo-liberal capitalism—can combine capitalism as means of wealth creation with more just distribution and, in the future, with ecological sustainability, sometimes called the “Green New Deal”. However, they neglect the specific historic conditions of that model after world war II: Fordist production as mass production, asking for mass buying power and, therefore, for adequate wages; more leverage of organized labor; the competition with communism, forcing capitalism to provide some kind of social justice; colonial and neo-colonial access to cheap raw material, esp. fossil energy sources; no limits to growth etc. Moreover the European prejudice overlooks the fact, that the European Union (EU) with its Lisbon Treaty has consciously changed the legal basis of the political economy. The treaty operates on the “principle of an open market economy with free competition”. The “social responsibility of property” has been abandoned and even the military global intervention for economic interests has been legalized etc. Practically, business and finance with more than 30 000 lobbyists in Brussels are calling the shots in the EU and in the capitals of the member states. So Europe is part of the global empire of capital, served and upheld by imperial political institutions, led by the USA. Differences between Europe and the USA still exist, but they are marginal.

This you can also observe looking at how politics in both the USA and Europe have handled the financial crisis since 2008. The states have bailed out the capital owners and their institutions, the banks, funds etc. with the tax money of the working citizens, while cutting down social and cultural budgets, thus socializing the losses of the speculators after privatizing the profits. This means that the political institutions have proved to be servants of capital, not of the people.[2] Consequently the private are now public debts which in turn allows the financial actors to speculate against the currencies and to rob even higher profits from the people—until the next bubble bursts, creating even larger social destruction—up to more people dying.

Without going into much detail the picture turns even more catastrophic when you add the ecological disaster. Most people seem surprised about what has happened in Fukushima. After Chernobyl Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker, a famous German physician and philosopher, calculated that statistically, according to probability mathematics, a catastrophe like this may happen every 25 years. And nowhere in the world do we have yet a  place where the radio-active remains can be securely buried. But this is only one problem. The dying of species is accelerating every day. The carbon emissions grow instead of being curbed, reinforcing climate-change. Capital is even making big profits in the trading of emissions. Land-grabbing is increasing in order to produce animal food for the consumption of the rich or agro-fuel for our cars, increasing hunger and the degradation of soils. The motor in all of this is the unlimited search for capital accumulation and increase of consumption for the haves—linked into the modern world view of technical progress.

It is evident that all of this is not the misbehavior of some immoral individuals but the result of systemic structures interacting with collective human and cultural ways of thinking and acting. Both have deep historic roots that have to be understood in order to analyze what is happening now and how alternatives can be developed.

I. The roots and the law of death-bound capitalism

Today we experience the financial markets as the dominant force of our destructive civilization. However, they are but the climax of a development starting nearly 3000 years ago. The context is the development of larger societies with growing division of labor and exchange of goods and services, using money connected with the legalizing of private property. Division of labor as such exists much earlier. But the question is how it is socially coordinated. Social coordination is necessary in order to organize the reproduction of life within a given community by production and distribution of goods and services to satisfy the basic needs of people. Hinkelammert and Mora, in their book on the subject, distinguish five types of the social coordination of labor, characteristic of particular periods of history but overlapping each other.[3] Building on this proposal I suggest to distinguish seven phases.

Let us have a brief look at these periods to understand the roots and law of capitalism.

1. In tribal societies (before 3000 BC) there are no special institutions for the social coordination of labor. As they are small their members organize the coordination by agreement and traditional rules.

2. The archaic societies (around 3000-8th century BC) in the form of city kingdoms and empires, also called hydraulic societies, institutionalize the social coordination of labor by way of conquest and administration. The commercial relations within those archaic societies in the beginning are only marginal, based on barter. They get stronger through the trade in large distance with luxury goods.

3. A basic change happens through the introduction of money and private property (8th century BC - 4th century CE.).[4] The historic roots of the new economy, based on money and private property date back to the 8th century BC. Among others the Buddhist economist Karl-Heinz Brodbeck in his book “Die Herrschaft des Geldes. Geschichte und Systematik” (The Dominance of Money: History and Systematic Analysis)[5] sees the cause for developing money (and property rights) in the growing division of labor linked to the growing of societies with large populations involved in bartering. The bartering in these societies would not be possible without a unifying measurement. This unity in the diversity of commodities is money—but not as a “thing” separate from the social process of acknowledging its value. The calculation in the process of bartering changes the thinking and the soul of the people. Besides communicating by speech in words (logos) they communicate by calculating in money (ratio). In doing so the Ego of the individual gains precedence over the relations in community. This is furthered by the fact that in the process of bartering in the market the money owner has more power than the producer of a commodity. Money as such offers access to the market while the product has first to be demanded in the market. Coping with this risk is only possible by having as much money as possible. This is the “objective” base for the greed to accumulate money without limits. The other implication of this is that money gives the right to private property beyond personal property. So money gives access to the market, cushions the risks in the market, measures the exchange value and gives access to property rights. Combined with the development of hierarchies and classes in larger societies with the division of labor, money and property start to determine the economic, social and political power of people within societies.

Let us have a closer look at the greed of people to accumulate limitless money. The institutionalization of this greed was the interest, later complemented by other forms of profit. A debtor had to pay back more than he had borrowed, for example, to purchase seed. He also had to put up his own land as security. Could he not pay back, he lost his land and had to work as a debt slave for the creditor. Thus private property and money came into existence at the same time and led to debt slavery and loss of land. On the other hand, the creditors could collect more and more land, money, and debt slaves. This is what scholars have named the emergence of a class society in Antiquity.[6] So the result of the introduction of money and private property is the increasing gap between rich (big landowners and merchants) and impoverished people (landless, debt slaves etc.) in societies, thus creating increased suffering among the majority of people.

4. However, it is not yet the merchants and bankers who form the dominant class but rather those who are entitled to profit from the monarchic and imperial tribute and those who are able to enlarge their estates and make personal slaves through the new debt mechanism. This leads to the period of slave labor and serfdom based societies (around 500 BC-13th century CE). So besides the traditional collective forced labor like e.g. in Egypt for the construction of imperial monuments, an individual slavery emerges through the new economy based on money and private property. This implies two very important changes: 1. Traditionally there were powers from outside in the form of conquistadores subjecting a group like the Egyptians the Hebrews or aristocratic classes who exploited the peasants. Now through the money-interest-property mechanism the bond of solidarity is broken between the peasants themselves through accumulation for the ones and loss of land and freedom for the others. With money and private property comes the individualism. 2. The slaves become personal property. Their social and cultural identity is being destroyed. They are being dehumanized.

The over-lapping of period 3 and 4, i.e. the property-money-interest economy linked with personal slavery, spread even more during the time of the Hellenistic empires. Roman Law finally legalized the absoluteness of property (“Dominium est jus utendi et abutendi re sua, quatenus juris ratio patitur” / ownership is the right to use and abuse/consume/destroy your thing as far as compatible with ratio, the logic of the law). As a matter of fact, the Hellenistic-Roman empires are characterized by the totalitarian linkage of the traditional dominance of military and political power with the property-money economy.

Part of this was already understood by Aristotle.[7] He analyzed that money is not by nature but introduced by humans as something basically new. It is measure and not measured by anything else. It mediates between the different needs of people. This is why people principally have the definition power over money. But the definition power over money also includes the possibility of misuse. This consists in the perversion of means and end. If money in a given community has to mediate the exchange of goods, necessary for the satisfaction of life needs, money accumulation as end in itself is not a moral problem but destroys life. The person, not recognizing his or her limits and so falling into the illusion of being able to buy endless means for life by endless accumulation of money, destroys the community and so finally himself because human beings can only survive as social beings. This is why Aristotle demands a political prohibition of taking interest and of monopolies as well as an ethical education of the citizens concerning these matters.

There is one further dimension inherent in the described developments, not understood by Aristotle: the male domination. The most probable hypothesis for the advent of patriarchy is the Kurgan hypothesis.[8] It seems that, beginning around 4400 BC, nomadic Kurgan people invaded Eastern and Southern Europe, coming from the Eurasian steppes. They built their power on cattle husbandry and superior military power in the form of horses. They overpowered the earlier matrilineal agrarian culture. Around the same time in the Middle East the hydraulic cultures developed large irrigation systems by hierarchical forms of organization. When private property and money came into use this male domination became reinforced by the fact that only men could own property giving them also the political power.

In Ancient Greece e.g. the farmer ruled as head of the household (despótes) over land, slaves, women and children. On this basis the farmer gained the freedom and leisure to meet as polítes, citizens, at the agora, the centre of the city, and to discuss and discharge the common affairs of the community. Trading took place here, but the main thing was politics including religious, judicial and sporting activities. The people's assembly met here.

In Rome property is called dominium. The dominion is meant literally, not just metaphorically, and goes to the heart of the matter. The origin is probably the rule of the pater familias, the dominus over the persons in the household and the furnishings. The patria potestas (power of the house-father) over the family (Lat. collective term familia pecuniaque, i.e. women, children, slaves, livestock) entails, as they are like things, rights concerning life and death (jus vitae necisve). It is absolute rule over things (jus in rem), and as such works against everyone, above all excluding them.[9]

Conclusion: Within the necessary social coordination of the division of labor from the beginning we observe different forms developing over the centuries. After mutuality and solidarity in the tribal societies we find various forms of coordination exploiting labor, particularly agrarian labor. Those who appropriate the surplus of the production process by tribute and collective forced labor are military and administrative classes in the beginning. With the introduction of both private property and money (with interest) leading to the accumulation of land on the one and loss of land plus debt slavery on the other side the solidarity of peasants is broken. Besides direct oppression this introduces anonymous indirect forms of extraction of the surplus of production, enhancing the splitting of societies in rich and poor. This is not just a structural problem because money also changes the souls of the people. Besides communicating through speech and cooperation humans start calculating including calculating each other in competition. So we face a psychological and spiritual in addition to the structural problem.

5. The time of early capitalism is the beginning of a “Great Transformation”. This is the title of the pivotal book of Karl Polanyi on the subject.[10] The key of his thesis is that since the 13th/14th century AD the market sets out to conquer one sphere of life after the other. The basic step is the privatization of land through enclosures subjecting agriculture to the mercantile coordination of labor. Another new development is that the cities start producing for the rural areas. So there is an integration of the production of cities and countryside into one market coordinated by the merchants. But both produce complete products for the market exchange.[11] This leads to a substantial increase of agrarian production but also to a monetarization of relations. What this means is aptly described by Jeremy Rifkin:

“Relationships were reorganized. Neighbours became employees or contractors. Reciprocity was replaced with hourly wages. People sold their time and labour where they used to share their toil. Human beings began to view each other and everything around them in financial terms. Virtually everyone and everything became negotiable and could be purchased at an appropriate price.”[12]

These are not questions of taste but of life and death. In the market, as we saw earlier, the money owner has priority over the owner of products because the latter has to struggle to sell his products. So he is at the mercy of the money owners in the market and can be manipulated and even blackmailed by speculation. The same applies to the wage laborer. He can become unemployed. So money has the power to exclude. This introduces a structural uncertainty into the lives of agrarian producers as well as wage laborers.[13] Fear becomes inherent in labor relations by the mercantile coordination of labor. And it is existential fear.

6. Industrial capitalism deepens the division of labor and increases the split between the classes. The division of labor reaches the production itself. In the factory production of the industrial revolution workers only produce a tiny section of the product. The famous example is the production of pins in the pivotal book of Adam Smith “The Wealth of Nations”.[14] They are produced by 18 distinct operations. The key is a new calculation of costs in order to increase the profit of the capital owners, controlling the means of production, at any costs. From ecological perspective the decisive factor is the use of fossil energy. It is the time of what is called “Manchester capitalism”. With this kind of mercantile coordination of the division of labor we observe social and ecological destruction.

7. Today’s financial capitalism even endangers the life of humanity and the earth as such. The key mechanism to produce this effect is to press the request of high profits for capital investments and credits on all productive and distributive sectors. Consequently the productive companies need to cut costs wherever possible: dumping wages, firing people through rationalization instead of using the productivity gains for shortening work hours, avoiding ecological costs where ever possible etc. Agriculture is being transformed into agribusiness, neglecting the consequences for the health of people and the fertility of the earth. Technical innovations are selected and used for higher profits, not for improving life quality. The production is geared not to satisfy needs, but to create desires towards limitless consumption. All of this forces the economy to grow—regardless the ecological costs. Where production is not yielding high enough profits, financial capital goes into all kinds of speculation, destabilizing the whole system as experienced in 2008. The state is taken hostage by transferring the private debts to the public budgets robbing the public budgets of the possibility to secure welfare and social security for the people, do necessary public investments etc. The situation is aggravated by the fact that through the globalization of capital also tax evasion of all sorts robs the public budget of the necessary means. All this leads to structural adjustments, internationally enforced by the IMF, controlled by the rich countries, now hitting not only the populations of the impoverished but also of the rich countries like in Europe.

Looking back at all periods of the division of labor it becomes clear that there is a read thread: It is the extraction of the surplus produced within the division of labor.[15] The original basis of the surplus is agriculture, extracted by cities and empires. Since the introduction of money and private property it is the owners of money/capital who profit from the growing role of market relations taking over the coordination of the division of labor. This means that the capital owners systematically, but legally rob the rest of society and the earth and even take the lives of millions each year. This is what Johan Galtung calls “structural violence”.

But this structural violence is also accompanied by direct violence. A convincing analysis of the historical phases of the linkage of structural and direct violence in the capitalist world system can be found in Giovanni Arrighi’s book, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times.[16] He shows how each regime of capital accumulation is coupled with a political-military-territorial power.

In the first phase, the capital power of Genoa links up with the hegemonic territorial power of Spain. It is characterized by direct robbery and genocide. Especially in Latin America they steal the minerals, particularly gold and silver, and nearly extinguish the indigenous people (9 out of 10 people die in the first 70 years).[17]

The main feature of the second phase, Mercantilism under Dutch hegemony, is the triangular trade: In Africa slaves are captured and shipped to the Americas for labor on the plantations in order to produce raw materials (like cotton). These are shipped to Europe to be manufactured and sold all over the world. In this case more than 70 million slaves are captured. Two thirds of them die in the process. So the two first phases of the so-called “primitive accumulation” of capital is literally built on death.

Industrial capitalism, under the hegemony of Great Britain, developed on the basis of the resources and capital collected by “primitive accumulation” through robbery and slavery as well as through mercantilism, exploiting the working people in Europe and the colonies abroad. Its climax is the imperialist colonialism, where the different European government servants of capital, followed by the USA in the 20th century, accompany the expanding capital throughout all continents.

Also Financial capitalism preparing the neo-liberal period under US-hegemony exerts a double pronged rule: using financial mechanisms, explained above, and, where this does not work, asks the imperialist forces to depose or kill leaders of rebellions against the empire of capital, like in the cases of Persia (1953), Kongo (1960), Brasil (1964), Indonesia (1966), Chile (1973) etc. and to install dictators in their place.[18] Where also this is not enough the USA and the “coalitions of the willing” intervene militarily directly, like many times in Central America and the Caribbean and in the three gulf wars with at least two million deaths, as well as in Afghanistan. I leave out the death caused already by the madness of the more than one trillion of dollars going into the production and deployment of weapons every year as well as the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. I am just pointing to the normal way how the empire of the capitalist world market functions with the help of imperial politics.

Structural and direct violence are finally supported by cultural violence. As we have already seen, the introduction of money and private property with the growing division of labor and exchange did not only change structures but the souls of human beings. The calculation in money terms is more and more getting priority over speech, changing the human relations profoundly. Through the increasing rule of money and private property in a “dis-embedded economy” (Karl Polanyi[19]), human relations have become ever more commercialized and individualized. In the early 17th century Thomas Hobbes formulated this capitalist market anthropology by defining human beings as individuals competing for ever more wealth, power, and reputation.[20] This “possessive individualism” corresponds with the new subject-object dualism formulated by Descartes. He defined the human being as “master and owner of nature.”[21] Along the same lines, Francis Bacon understood science as power: “the power and the dominion of the human species over the entire world of nature”—including women and indigenous people (Naturvölker) as part of nature.[22]

This whole approach is presented as rational. However, ratio is reduced to the means-end rationality.[23] The male owner-master subject is the calculating individual, called homo oeconomicus. Efficiency and competitiveness are the benchmarks disregarding the conditions of life on earth. Hinkelammert characterizes him as the person, putting all energy in sharpening the saw, with which he cuts the branch on which he sits. The whole system is regulated by the pursuit of individual calculated material interests disregarding the non-intentional effects on the whole of society and earth. This is how the irrationality of the rationalized, we are experiencing today, develops. Karl Marx puts it this way: “Capitalist production thus develops technology and, as its logical conclusion, the processes of social production only by simultaneously undermining the sources of all wealth—the earth and the worker.”[24] And it echoes Apostle Paul’s concept of the absolute law that kills, because it does not put the needs of each human being in relation to other human beings, called love/solidarity, into the centre. So death in capitalism follows systemically from the inner economic logic of calculated material interests, politically implemented by laws (making property and contracts an absolute and extending and defending them with direct violence), and finally mediated through individuals being steered by the fetishism of the commodities, money and capital. So looking for alternatives of life we have to deal always with the interaction between the logic, political structures on the one and human beings, driven by this logic and subjecting themselves to the law of capital accumulation, on the other side.

II. How people can opt for life

If it is true that capitalism within the context of modernity as a whole economically, politically and culturally leads to death, it is not a question of optional morality or ethics we are dealing with. It is a matter of life and death. If humanity and life on earth is have a future we must change the dominant logic, structures and our own spirituality, thinking and acting at the same time. Where are the sources, powers and actors for such deep conversion? Let us first look at the ancient times when the money-property economy started.

1. Inspiration from the Axial Age

In the book “Becoming Human in Solidarity” (2006)[25] we, the authors, suggested to review what Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age” in order to tap the inspirations of ancient cultures and faiths for coping with the present deep crisis of global capitalism and its destructive effects. Our goal was to find elements of a new humanness and culture of life. Karl Jaspers, after World War II, raised the question of why and how there was a basic turning point in human history during the period of 800-200 BC and what this meant for developing a planetary new order.[26] He had observed that at the same time there was a basic transformation going on in distant cultures like Israel, India, China and Greece in parallel ways. He saw the meaning of the change in an intellectual and spiritual breakthrough, providing the categories and potentials for the following human history driving humanity towards universal communication. The time before he regarded as prehistory. This is why he named this period “Axial Age”. He could not find one single cause for the parallelism in the different cultures. He characterized the new approach as intellectual and spiritual (“Geist”), looking only marginally at the economic and political context. On the whole his—very valuable—book takes an idealistic approach.

In 2006 also Karen Armstrong published a whole book on the Axial Age.[27] It is a detailed study of the cultures and religions in China, India, Israel/Judah and Greece during that period—admirable in depth and breadth. She starts from the present dangerous situation of our planet asking for a spiritual revolution transcending modernity:

“The explosion of the first atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki laid bare the nihilistic self-destruction at the heart of the brilliant achievements of our modern culture. We risk environmental catastrophe because we no longer see the earth as holy but regard it simply as a ‘resource’. Unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that can keep abreast of our technological genius, it is unlikely that we will save our planet” (XV).

So she is looking to the “Axial sages” for inspiration:

“Their objective was to create an entirely different kind of human being. All the sages preached a spirituality of empathy and compassion; they insisted that people must abandon their egotism and greed, their violence and unkindness…Each tradition developed its own formulation of the Golden Rule: do not do to others what you would not have done unto you. As far as the Axial sages were concerned, respect for the sacred rights of all beings—not orthodox belief—was religion. If people behaved with kindness and generosity to their fellows, they could save the world” (XVIIIf).

With this kind of approach she had to and did study the contexts of the respective Axial cultures. But her main interest relates to overcoming war and violence. She touches economy only in passing. She also does not really harvest the consequences of her penetrating insights in the Axial spiritualities for the transformation of our present political economy, anthropology and spirituality.

This is what Jeremy Rifkin in his book “The Empathic Civilization”[28] tries to do, building—among others—on Armstrong’s research of the Axial Age. Also this is an admirable study, however, his hope for a decisive victory of empathy through modern communication techniques and what he calls “distributed capitalism” seems to neglect the analysis of the institutional and personal power of property and money as well as their influence on the other sectors of western civilization.

So how to interpret the Axial Age? We have seen how the introduction of money, private property and interest in societies with a growing division of labor split the societies in rich and poor. The necessity to use money as measuring means of exchange provided the objective base for stimulating greed towards the limitless accumulation of money and property. The struggle against the new economy, spreading increasingly since the 8th century BC, can first be observed in Ancient Israel. Is it just by accident that this century is being regarded as the start of the Axial Age? My thesis is that it is exactly the new economy, based on money and property, prompting the Axial Age’s religious and philosophical revolution. This economy was not only splitting societies in rich and poor and increasing the violence beyond the traditional direct oppression of the peasants by the king and the aristocrats. Rather it changed also the hearts and the thinking of the people as we have seen. This, of course, required not only a response on the power level of the political economy but also on the anthropological, psychological and spiritual levels. Exactly this is characteristic for the cultural and religious transformations of the Axial Age in Israel, India, China and Greece. Because our theme is Capitalism and Christianity, I limit myself to the biblical heritage. May be that Paul Knitter later today will enlighten us about the other traditions.

However, before I turn to Ancient Israel and the Jesus movement, let me begin with a caution. It is not possible to simply take the insights of the religions and philosophies of the Axial Age and apply them as a response to the crisis of our civilization. Even religions are highly ambivalent. They can be used and perverted by political and economic powers to serve particular interests, even increasing injustice and violence. This is why we have to go through a (self-)critique of religion before we are equipped for the critique of modernity from the perspective of the Axial sage, and before we can turn to a new vision and practice of a life-giving culture.

Summarizing one can say that money, linked to political and military power, accompanied by spiritual-ideological power have co-opted not only reason and law, as Paul shows, but the churches, carrying the name of the Messiah Jesus himself (already pre-figured in the opponents of Paul in his letters). This poses stark theological, spiritual, practical and strategic questions. What is to be the remedy against unjust powers, when religions become an instrument of power—and an extremely powerful instrument of power. No secular system or person has more power than that with religious justification or toleration—which is not only true for Christianity, but any other faith community. The problem is not that religions have a blot on their escutcheon but because of their power over hearts and minds their role transcends the secular powers in good and bad. It is bad when these commit injustice and destructive violence but it is worse when injustice and violence are done in the name of religion. When there is sickness it can be healed by medicine. But when the medicine is poisoned it is more dangerous because the hope for healing is killed.

This is why it is extremely important to find out how to fight the perversion of religions. Critique of religion—how paradoxical this may sound—is a primary task for religion if it wants to live up to its true mission and original potentials. This can already be seen in the Bible itself. Here we find an ongoing (self-)critical evaluation of the tradition. It finds its classical form in Jesus’ message of God’s domination-free order, criticizing all forms of oppression, legitimated by religion. In this perspective there is no pure text. Each text leads us into the conflict between the wisdom of God and the wisdom of the dominating world order. But there is one clear criterion to judge each text and use of the text: “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is the weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world (i.e. the Plebeians in the Roman Empire, the Proletariat in modernity etc.), things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are…” (1 Cor 1:27ff.). So reading the texts in this critical perspective from below can never fail. This is the biblical yard stick to carry out the critique of religion—a never ending task.

In this critical perspective we can see several approaches in the bible trying to overcome the negative effects of the new money-property economy linked to several kinds of political power.

(1) The historically first critical reaction to the new economy is the protest of the great prophets in the last part of the 8th and the whole 7th century BC. Amos and Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and others call for justice and righteousness, lost through the new property rights and money mechanisms. They claim that, with the cancellation of justice and the rights of the poor, also Yahweh, the liberating God of Israel, has been abandoned. For knowing God is identical with doing justice to the poor (Jer 22:16).

(2) The prophetic interventions of the 8th and 7th centuries did have consequences. This can be seen by the legal reforms from this time and later. The first happened in the Southern Kingdom, probably after the experience of the catastrophic fall of the Northern Kingdom  (722 BC). The codified result of this can be found in the so-called Book of Covenant (Ex 21-23). These beginnings were confirmed and unfolded in the second reform, the core of which can be found in the Deuteronomy. The third reform is the Holiness Code (Leviticus). They introduce preventive laws like the prohibition of taking interest, but also corrective laws like the Sabbath year, asking for the cancellation of debts and the release of debt slaves every seventh year. The key is, there must be no absolute property of land. Land must not be a commodity, but is entrusted to all families as productive property for use, because the land belongs to God and, therefore must be the basis for the means of life for all families (Lev 25:23). Also the Ten Commandments have to be understood in this context. Within the people of the liberating God there must be no exploitation of human labor nor gods, legitimating this. The Tenth Commandment adds the prohibition of the greed for accumulation: “Neither shall you greedily desire your neighbor’s house or field … or anything that belongs to your neighbor” (Deut 5:21).

(3) When the Hellenistic Empires start to become economically and politically totalitarian, the Judeans respond by different forms of resistance. The key text for this period is the book of Daniel, showing the different forms of non-violent direct action. Jesus is building on this apocalyptic resistance tradition, adding another element, (4) the development of alternative, small scale communities organizing themselves in the form of solidarity economy. This approach is picked up in the primitive church (cf. Acts 4:32ff.).

(5) Linked to this struggle for an alternative political economy there are efforts to discover what it means to be really human. The prophet Ezekiel, during the Babylonian exile, is the first to discover the humanness of God (chap. 1). On this basis the priestly Genesis narrative speaks about the relational female and male couple, created in the image of God (Gen 1:26-28). The priestly Holiness Code summarizes the consequence: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18). Daniel 7 sees the kingdom of God with a human face overcoming the imperial predatory beasts. Jesus links the knowledge of God with the love of the neighbor in the sense of the Levinas translation of the verse: “Love your neighbor—it is yourself”. Paul deepens this insight by critically analyzing the co-opting of the law through greed and power, so that it becomes a law of death. As opposite he promotes the fulfillment of the law through love, solidarity (Romans 13:8-10).

So we can identify five biblical options in dealing with the market economy and empire as well as the calculating subject, going along with them. They are:

1. Prophetic critique of economic and political power in the perspective of creating just relations ins society;
2. Legal regulation of the system as long as there is a chance to reform it;
3. Resistance in the case of totalitarian empires;
4. Living alternatively in small groups becoming a kind of leaven in society—even forming networks of solidarity between those groups throughout the empire (cf. the collection of the Apostle Paul for the poor in Jerusalem, 2 Cor 8-9).
5. The discovery of relational love/solidarity as the alternative to the imperial Roman law that kills as well as to the distorted human way life, captured by the sin of greed.

These biblical approaches could be complemented by other responses from religions and philosophies of the Axial Age. Let me only mention Buddhism. Here the main starting point is the liberation from the illusion of the Ego, greedily and aggressively trying to accumulate and to defend the possessions, thus creating suffering. The way out has to be found by walking the eightfold Noble Path, including the realization of the knowledge of mutual inter-dependency of all living beings, empathy and loving kindness. Each person is called to walk this path in the context of communities (sanghas).

As outlined above, in reality we face the ambivalence of religions. Besides sectors who try to live up to the liberating aspects of the original impulses of the Axial Age we find sectors in complicity with the dominating system. As this is globally endangering life, my conclusion is that the liberating sectors of faith communities have to build up alliances of solidarity for life in just relations among themselves and together with social movements. According to Matthews 25, 31ff. Jesus sees those, who care for the satisfaction of the basic needs of the people (hunger, thirst etc.), as the ones who finally are accepted in the eyes of the human one—regardless whether they carry the label of a Jesus follower or not. Together they can form groups of healing and liberation from the Roman system in those days and from the capitalist mentality and practice today.

2. Opting for life today

On the basis of our analysis of modernity and the Axial Age the key question is: how to develop a new understanding and practice of human life in liberated just relationships and how to organize the political economy accordingly? In this context it is of help that even in western sciences new thinking—similar to the perspectives of the Axial sages—is emerging. E.g. brain research found out that the human being has a natural tendency towards empathy through the so-called mirror neurons. They explain why we spontaneously feel pain when we see pain in another living being. There is also a tendency towards cooperation.[29] Relational psychology points into the same direction of homo empathicus.[30] William Fairbairn, Heinz Kohut, Donald Winnicott and others have demonstrated that sociability is the primary drive in human beings, while aggression is a compensatory response, when the primary drive is violated by biographic experiences. Subjectivity is grounded in inter-subjectivity. Even biology has discovered that many animal species besides primates participate in the mirror neuron system, showing empathy.[31] Already the later works of Darwin (“The Descent of Man” and “Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals”) realize the emotional, social nature of animals. “Darwin came to believe that the survival of the fittest is as much about cooperation, symbiosis, and reciprocity as it is about individual competition and that the most fit are just as likely to enter into cooperative bonds with their fellows.”[32] Even certain schools of economics rediscover the commons (e.g. Elinor Ostrom), and economic happiness research revises the significance of wealth accumulation, putting the main emphasis on succeeding relationships.

David Korten, choosing life as the guiding metaphor, has drawn the consequences of these insights for an economic paradigm transcending capitalism and centrally planed economy.[33] Building on research results of biologists like Lynn Margulis he designs an economy, patterned after the model of living organisms. They work in a de-centralized, yet coordinated, self-organizing way. No cell is allowed to grow disproportionately—this would be cancer (like capitalism). No cell dominates the rest (like centrally planned economy). Rather every cell cooperates with the whole for the survival of the whole. Institutionally this approach can be complemented by the concept of the commons. It avoids the absoluteness of private property as well as that of state property, concentrating economic and political power at the top. This concept has also deep theological implications. In his draft of a guilt-confession of the churches Dietrich Bonhoeffer formulates: “The church confesses her guilt in relation to all ten commandments… She was not able to communicate God’s care credibly enough so that all human economic activity would have received its task from this perspective.”[34] This means that all economy must be built on God’s gifts to secure the life of all creatures—in opposition to commodifying nature in the interest of accumulation of capital (cf. Lev. 25:23).

On this conceptual basis Korten proposes a strategy under the formula “Starve the Cancer—Nurture Life”.[35] Working for a life-enhancing economy we have to withdraw energy from the dominating death-bound, cancerous system, while at the same time we develop life-oriented economic activities and institutions. How could this strategy be unfolded and concretized?

We can withhold legitimacy and energy from the system by various means. First we can demystify the myths and blatant lies by which capitalism, especially in its neo-liberal imperial form, justifies and smokescreens its premises and consequences.[36] Take for example the myth that technological development destroys jobs. What if the productivity gains would be used to shorten work hours instead of being drawn into capital accumulation? Or the claim that capitalist globalization creates growth and welfare for all? What if the social and ecological losses of this approach result in a net minus? Or take the theory that the financial system works best in a self-regulating market? The financial crisis is a chance for people to start distrusting these mainstream economic theories. A second step to withdraw energy from the system is defiance, saying a clear No to the system as such and implementing the No through boycotts. The Lutheran and Reformed World Communities as well as the WCC declared their clear No in official Assembly decisions between 2003 and 2006. The Reformed Accra Confession[37] is the most well-known text of these, saying e.g.:

“(18) We believe that God is sovereign over all creation. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” (Psalm 24.1).

“(19) Therefore, we reject the current world economic order imposed by global neoliberal capitalism and any other economic system, including absolute planned economies, which defy God’s covenant by excluding the poor, the vulnerable and the whole of creation from the fullness of life. We reject any claim of economic, political, and military empire which subverts God’s sovereignty over life and acts contrary to God’s just rule.”

Nurturing life is made possible by a double strategy.

1. It can be implemented on a small scale when people at local/regional level or as members of an intentional organization choose to work in post-capitalist ways.[38] The first example is the Local Exchange and Trading Systems (LETs), another cooperative banks. There are 35 alternative banks in Europe coordinated in I.N.A.I.S.E (International Association of Social Finance Organizations).[39] Another key field of action is energy production. The energy of the future, sun, wind, water and biomass is available in de-centralized forms. Every community can make itself independent of the big capitalist corporations controlling the energy market. In Germany our best example is Schönau in the Black Forest, having gained complete energy self-reliance. Finally basic foodstuff can be produced and marketed locally/regionally by producer-consumer cooperatives. Another name of this type of small scale economy is social or solidarity economy.[40] All of this people can do while the dominating system is still in place. But this is not enough in itself because the system is constantly threatening the survival of the small scale alternatives. So we need to address the macro-structures at the same time.

2. The second part of the strategy is to regain the control of the macro-system by and for the people in order to re-appropriate the gifts of God, robbed by the capital owners and their political and ideological servants, for the life of all people in harmony with nature. The starting point must be the goods and services for the satisfaction of the basic needs of people: water, food, energy, housing, health, education, transport etc. It is here where people can be mobilized and build alliances between social movements, trade unions, faith communities etc. for the struggle. A basic question in all of this is about how to organize property beyond the false alternative of absolute private or state property.[41] Here all kinds of cultural traditions, including socialist ones, come into play. There is not just one property order, but a host of legal and institutional options. Key is that the people affected are the subjects of the ownership arrangement. Here are some examples of such struggles:

• For water and energy as common good against privatization
• For money and credit as common good against making money a commodity and allow banks to create money by credits
• For democratic banks
• For education, health and transport as public services
• For a life-giving agriculture
• For the worker’s co-ownership and control of the means of production in industry
• For allowing all people the same ecological footprint (e.g. towards the goal to reach the emission of 1 ton per year per person in order to limit the global warming to 2 degrees Celsius)
• For tax justice etc.

A political economy along these lines will not create a paradise. There will be conflicts. Therefore, representative democracy, because it has been co-opted by the empire of capital, will have to be complemented by direct and participative democracy in order to find people-centered solutions in the frame of a people-driven economy.

All of this is happening today all over the world. Humanity has to choose. This is most difficult for those who live in the illusion they can be winners while the situation of the majority of people and the earth is deteriorating. Continuing in the present way of capitalism and modernity will be suicidal. Becoming human in just relationships and developing the political economy accordingly will help us to find the way towards life in dignity—also for our children and grand-children.

 

---

 

[1] Cf. European churches living their faith in the context of globalisation: A position paper of the Church and Society Commission of the Conference of European Churches, Brussels 2006.

 

[2] Cf. W. Greider, The End of New Deal Liberalism, in The Nation, Jan 5,2011, for the USA, and Manifesto on the Crisis of the Euro (http://www.attac-netzwerk.de/fileadmin/user_
upload/Gremien/Wissenschaftlicher_Beirat/ATTAC%20Scientific%20Council%20Germany
%20Mainfesto%20on%20the%20crisis%20of%20the%20Euro%20march%202011.pdf)

 

[3] Hinkelammert, F.J./Mora, H.M., 2001, Coordinación social del trabajo, mercado y reproducción de la vida humana, DEI, San José/Costa Rica, p.176ff.

 

[4] Cf. Duchrow, Ulrich / Hinkelammert, Franz J., (2002) 2005 2. Aufl., Leben ist mehr als Kapital. Alternativen zur globalen Diktatur des Eigentums, Publik Forum, Oberursel.

 

[5] Brodbeck, Karl-Heinz, 2009, Die Herrschaft des Geldes. Geschichte und Systematik, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt. See also Sozialgeschichtliches Wörterbuch zur Bibel, hg. von Crüsemann, F./Hungar,C./Janssen, C./ Kessler, R./Schottroff, L., 2009, Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh, Art. Geld.

 

[6] Cf. Kippenberg, Hans G., 1977.

 

[7] Cf. Brodbeck, op. cit. 412ff.; Duchrow, Ulrich, (1995) 19982, Alternatives to Global Capitalism – Drawn from Biblical History, Designed for Political Action, International Books with Kairos Europa, Utrecht, 20ff.

 

[8] Cf. Rifkin, op. cit., p. 22f. with further literature, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan#Kurgan_hypothesis.

 

[9] See H. Chr. Binswanger, 1978, 21: “Property (and thereby “having”) was not understood legally as a relation between different persons (because one has, the other has not), but as a relation between a person and an legal object. Thereby property is legally not a having of a person in conjunction with a non-having of another, but only the having as such.” See also N. Luhmann, 1974, p. 66 (German edition): “The unity of “having” and “not having” is not reflected on in language or law. It is only construed as an owner's right of exclusion... The sociologically most relevant problem, the fact that any growth in ownership automatically means a disproportionate increase in the non-ownership of the other, is not relevant in legal terms.”

 

[10] Polanyi, Karl, 1944, The great transformation, Rinehart, New York. Cf. also Duchrow/Hinkelammert, op.cit. chapter 2. See also Duchrow/Hinkelammert, (2002) 2005, chapter 2

 

[11] Cf. Hinkelammert/Mora, op.cit. 187

 

[12] J. Rifkin, 1998, 40f.

 

[13] Cf. Hinkelammert/Mora, op.cit. 188ff.

 

[14] Smith, Adam, 1979, An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, Liberty Press, Indianapolis, vol. I, 15.

 

[15] Cf. Hinkelammert/Mora, op.cit. 193ff.

 

[16] G. Arrighi, 1994; cf. U. Duchrow, 1992.

 

[17] Cf. Duchrow, Ulrich, 1992, Europe in the World System 1492-1992, WCC, Geneva.

 

[18] Cf. Perkins, John, 2004, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Berret-Koehler Publishers, San Fancisco; Duchrow, U./Eisenbürger, G.,/Hippler, J. (ed.), 1990, Total War Against the Poor: Confidential Documents of the 17th Conference of American Armies, Mar del Plata, Argentina, 1987,  New York CIRCUS Publications,  New York.

 

[19] Polanyi, Karl, (1944) 1978.

 

[20] Cf. Duchrow/Hinkelammert, op.cit., chapter 2.

 

[21] Cf. U. Duchrow/G. Liedke, 1989, pp. 65ff.

 

[22] Ibid.

 

[23] Cf. Hinkelammert, Franz, 2007, Das Subjekt und das Gesetz. Die Wiederkehr des verdrängten Subjekts, Edition ITP-Kompass, Münster, chapters 1 and 9.

 

[24] Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels, Werke Bd. 23, Das Kapital, Berlin/DDR. 1976, S. 530 (Complete Works Vol. 23, Capital).

 

[25] Duchrow, Ulrich/Bianchi, Reinhold/Krüger, René/Petracca, Vincenzo, 2006, chapter 10.

 

[26] Jaspers, Karl, 1949, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, Artemis, Zürich; (Engl. Ed. Jaspers, Karl, 2010, The Origin and Goal of History, Routledge Revivals, UK.). Cf. also Eisenstadt, S.N., 1987, Kulturen der Achsenzeit – Ihre Ursprünge und ihre Vielfalt, parts 1 and 2, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt.

 

[27] Armstrong, Karen, 2006, The Great Transformation. The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, Anchor Books/Random House, New York. As far as I can see, she does not indicate that she takes her title from the pivotal study of Karl Polanyi, 1945, Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation, Gollancz, London.

 

[28] Rifkin, Jeremy, 2009, The Empathic Civilization. The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, Penguin Books, London.

 

[29] Cf. Bauer, Joachim, 2005, Warum ich fühle, was du fühlst – Intuitive Kommunikation und das Geheimnis der Spiegelneuronen, Hamburg; idem, 2008, Prinzip Menschlichkeit: Warum wir von Natur aus kooperieren, Heyne, München; Rifkin, op. cit. p. 82ff.

 

[30] Cf. Duchrow, Ulrich/Bianchi, Reinhold/Krüger, René/Petracca, Vincenzo, 2006; Rifkin, op. cit. p. 55f.

 

[31] Cf. Rifkin, op. cit. p. 82ff.

 

[32] Ibid. p.91.

 

[33] Korten, David, 2000, The Post-Corporate World: Life after Capitalism, Kumarian Press/Berret-Koehler, West Hartford, CT/SanFrancisco, CA, p. 103ff.

 

[34] D. Bonhoeffer, DWB, vol. 6, 131ff.: “Die Kirche bekennt sich schuldig aller 10 Gebote... sie hat die Fürsorge Gottes nicht so glaubhaft zu machen vermocht, dass alles menschliche Wirtschaften von ihr aus seine Aufgabe in Empfang genommen hätte.”

 

[35] Ibid 262ff.

 

[36] Cf. e.g. Jenkins, David, 2000, Market Whys & Human Wherefores: Thinking Again About Markets, Politics and People, Cassell, London.

 

[37] http://warc.jalb.de/warcajsp/news_file/The_Accra_Confession_English.pdf.

 

[38] Cf. Douthwaite, Richard, 1996, Short Circuit: Strengthening Local Economies for Security in an Unstable World, The Lilliput Press, Dublin.

 

[39] http://www.inaise.org/en/node/11.

 

[40] For Europe see http://www.socialeconomy.eu.org/?lang=en; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_economy; http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economia_solidária.

 

[41] Cf. Duchrow/Hinkelammert, op. cit. chapter 7.